Lunch with BS: Aruna Sundararajan on why women make good administrators

Sundararajan tells Surajeet Das Gupta how many of the problems facing the telecom industry have to do with regulation and why women make good administrators

She says her job in the telecom ministry is unconventional — in fact, she does not feel she is a bureaucrat after all. “I feel more like a chess player, thinking for long hours how to make the next move,” she says with a chuckle. That is because, in most other ministries the focus for an IAS officer is making public policy, but in the telecommunications ministry it is more about “commercial arbitration”, says Aruna Sundararajan, its soft spoken secretary. 

I am meeting Sundararajan at The Deck in the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi. She has spent over a year in